The Greek philosopher Thales appears to have been the first to observe electrical force. From this, he noted that rubbing a piece of amber with fur caused it to attract feathers. It is interesting that the Greek name for amber was elektron and the name has since been used in electrical engineering. An important concept in electrical systems is that electrical energy is undoubtedly tied to magnetic energy. Thus when there is an electric force, there is an associated magnetic force. The growth in understanding of electrics and magnetics began during the 1600s when the court physician of Queen Elizabeth I, William Gilbert, investigated magnets and found that the Earth had a magnetic field. From this he found that a freely suspended magnet tends to align itself with the magnetic field lines of the Earth. From then on, travelers around the world could easily plot their course because they knew which way was North. Much of the early research in magnetics and electrics was conducted in the Old World, mainly in England, France and Germany. However, in 1752, Benjamin Franklin put the USA on the scientific map when he flew a kite in an electrical storm and discovered the flow of electrical current. This experiment is not recommended and resulted in the premature deaths of several scientists. In 1785, the French scientist Charles Coulomb showed that the force of attraction and repulsion of electrical charges varied inversely with the square of the distance between them. He also went on to show that two similar charges repel each other, while two dissimilar charges attract. Two scientists who were commemorated by giving their name to electrical units, made most of their findings in the 1820s. The French scientist André Ampère studied electrical cur-rent in wires and the forces between them, and then, in 1827, the German scientist Georg Ohm studied the resistance to electrical flow. From this, he determined that resistance in a conductor was equal to the voltage across the material divided by the current through it. Soon after this, English scientist Michael Faraday produced an electric generator when he found that the motion of a wire through an electric field generated electricity, and mathe-matically expressed the link between magnetism and electricity.